Vietnam’s Empty Forests – The New York Times

Despite lengthy and tragic wars with the Japanese, the French, the Chinese and the United States over the last century, Vietnam is a treasure home. It is likely one of the world’s sizzling spots of organic variety, in response to the science analysis. There are 30 nationwide parks in a rustic a bit bigger than New Mexico, and about as many sorts of animals as in these pre-eminent safari locations, Kenya and Tanzania.

In truth, lots of of latest-to-science species of crops and animals have been found in Vietnam over the last three a long time, and extra are recorded every year. The antelope-like saola, for instance. Its mild, streaked face seems to be as if it has simply escaped from a jungle-dream portray by Henri Rousseau. Heralded as “the last unicorn” for its rarity, the saola is the most important land-dwelling animal found wherever since 1937. A small herd of lengthy-misplaced rhinos, a barking deer and a striped rabbit have additionally turned up. So has a large, 21-inch-lengthy strolling-supermodel, and lots of sorts of birds — laughing thrushes! — fish, snakes and frogs hitherto unknown or considered extinct.

Vietnam’s forests shelter two dozen species of primates — gibbons, macaques, lorises and langurs, usually in colours that make the human tribe look banal against this.

A promotional e mail I obtained from Cuc Phuong National Park was tantalizing: “The ancient forest contains almost 2,000 species of trees and among them live some amazing and rare animals including the clouded leopard, Delacour’s langur, Owston’s civet, otters and Asian black bears! … owls, flying squirrels, lorises, bats and cats.”

But in making an attempt to make preparations to go to, the journey fixers my spouse and I contacted have been oddly hesitant about pure areas and wildlife, they usually saved nudging us again towards mere surroundings, or to cities. And then this e mail: “Have you been to Vietnam before, or know of the situation there? It’s pretty dire if you are not aware.”

Dire for wildlife?

“Very much so. In Vietnam, national parks are primarily in name only, and poaching (often practiced by park rangers) and worse has decimated wildlife.”

Calls to conservation personnel who reside and work in Vietnam reconciled the seeming contradictions. Yes, the nation is an epicenter for wild species variety. No, wildlife journey just isn’t a lot pursued, and Vietnam has additionally develop into a world center for criminal wildlife trafficking.

Its wild populations, already hemmed in by habitat destruction because of an exploding human population, are also being shot, snared and live-captured so efficiently that national parks and other natural areas are now mostly afflicted with “empty forest syndrome”: suitable forest habitat from which even small animals and birds have been hunted into local extinction. Other Asian countries are in various stages of the same convulsion. It’s frequently said that many new species vanish before science can even discover them.

Some of this carnage supplies national appetites for Eastern traditional medicine in Vietnam and neighboring China. Examples from a lengthy catalog of purported remedies include: tiger penises for impotence, bear bile for cancer, rhino horn for a hangover, loris bile to ease the serious airway infections that arise from Vietnam’s air pollution.

Even more of the motivation, surveys have found, “is to supply the rampant demand for wildlife meat in urban restaurants, which is very much a status issue,” said Barney Long, director of species conservation for the nonprofit group Global Wildlife Conservation.

“This is not bush meat where poor people are hunting for food,” he said. “It’s a status symbol to take your business or government colleagues out for a wildlife meal. And honestly it’s on a scale that is mind boggling. We’re talking not about one or two species, but whole communities of wildlife disappearing.”

After further scouting, my wife and I decided to go anyway, arranging to fly into Hanoi, in the north, and move quickly to Vietnam’s green outback. Then we would head south to Ho Chi Minh City, the former Saigon, for a circuit of the parks and natural areas there.

Over the course of our two-week trip, we found that some exquisite wild species hold out, though in threatened circumstances. And we were fortunate, if half-willing, witnesses to the struggle by native Vietnamese, and their international conservation allies, to halt what amounts to animal genocide.

Cuc Phuong, the nation’s first national park, is a couple of hours south of Hanoi. It was created in 1962 by Ho Chi Minh, who prophesied that “the current destruction of our forests will lead to serious effects on climate, productivity and life. The forest is gold. If we know how to conserve and manage it well, it will be very valuable.”

But despite the blandishments in that government-issued invitation to the park we’d received, there are no more Delacour’s langurs in these forests, nor any other kind. No bears, leopards or smaller cats either, unless they are so well hidden that even scientists cannot find them, Adam Davies, director of the Endangered Primate Rescue Center, told me.

Instead, the richest collection of rare animals can be found along a quiet narrow park road lined by animal rescue centers that amounts to a kind of conservation superhighway. At the Primate Rescue Center, visitors can see four species of nearly extinct langurs (also called leaf-eating monkeys), gibbons and lorises, many of which were rescued from wildlife traffickers. They are doctored back to health, bred when possible, and in especially fortunate circumstances, are returned to the wild. Poachers make the rest of this national park too hostile a landscape to risk releasing most kinds of animals, Mr. Davies said.

His center reintroduced some critically endangered Delacour’s langurs to the wild in the Van Long Wetland Nature Reserve, about 90 minutes down the road. There we boarded a small rowboat at a landing, plied by one of a cluster of local guides, for a half-day float within a protected gorge.

We veered off, along a route no one else in the pack of boats had taken. The langurs, now breeding successfully somewhere out there, stayed hidden. That’s the nature of such quests, of course: Enjoy the pretty sojourn, even if your quarry eludes you. Maybe all those other little boats had gone in a better direction?

Then heading back we heard shouts from a farmer, off in the brush. He was pointing excitedly at some shaking trees on the opposite shore. A rowdy group of 10 langurs ultimately emerged — this species is black with what look like mutton-chop side whiskers and white pants — and we spent most of a transfixed hour watching them groom and chase and bask in the intense subtropical sun. With luck, they’ll continue to be protected here and not become fodder for the meat or pet trades.

In the valley below is a bear sanctuary operated by Animals Asia and sometimes open to visitors. We watched two species — moon bears and the smaller sun bears — romp, swim and climb within a specially constructed recreation habitat. Both look like wild-haired, punk-rock versions of North American black bears and have vivid white chevron collars. They have arrived here from bear bile farms where they live in cruelly close confinement, as their bile is repeatedly extracted until they expire.

The practice is now illegal, though loopholes make the law difficult to enforce, said Tuan Bendixsen, the director of the center. “Bear bile extraction is still going on,” he said. “You can still buy it down in Hanoi if you want to.”

Many of the bears he gets “are missing limbs, or are damaged in other ways,” he said, which makes their chances for return to the wild slender. And suitable wild land for such releases is increasingly rare, he said, as the human population and the national economy grow.

The corruption that afflicts Vietnam’s one-party government, along with the growing economy, are major factors in the disappearance of natural habitat and endangered species. Corruption was given as a major reason for weak protections and slack enforcement by the conservation groups we spoke with.

“There are issues with corruption in all segments of Vietnamese society, and forest protection is no different,” said Andrew Tilker, an American field researcher who tracks the saola and other rare species.

We witnessed that clash of aspirations during a stay near Ninh Binh, a couple of hours south of Hanoi. There we had found the loveliest lodging of our trip — and the competition was keen — at a place called Tam Coc Gardens. It’s a few stone bungalows hidden within a lush landscape, ringed by colossal limestone rock formations and plateaus we had only seen in watercolor paintings. We had picked the place because it is a half-hour bike ride from the Thung Nham Bird Park.

We rolled into the park one late afternoon and wondered if we had somehow lost the way. Though touted as an “ecological” destination, the park has been taken over by a tourism corporation with big plans. We walked past broad lawns and wide lakes fringed with forest, all heavily manicured and completely bereft of bird life. On the near shore, jackhammers, chain saws and grinding trucks battered the air in the ambitious expansion of a lakeside resort — not well calculated for maintaining bird habitat.

At length, we located a boat shed and found a woman with a traditional conical hat and a big oar. For a small fee she rowed us and three other passengers out onto the barren-looking lake and toward a wall of bamboo. Stow the binoculars. No birds to see, or hear. Maybe it was just the weather.

Ten minutes in, we began to hear what sounded like an agitated conversation among members of the world’s biggest book group, somewhere out of view. Then our boat glided into a rookery with hundreds of herons and storks, each one as big as a 2-year-old child, perched, preening or at times filling the sky overhead. It was a delight, but its future may depend on that construction project, and whether the solemn, barren-seeming lakes next door are symptomatic of how this landscape will be managed.

Another source of hope for Vietnam lies in engaging local communities in wildlife protection with economic incentives. The World Wildlife Fund, for example, sponsors sustainable rattan and acacia farming as buffer zones for beleaguered natural preserves along the western border with Laos. In other places, environmental groups pay local people a living wage to patrol the rain forest and collect those thousands of deadly snares.

Tourism, growing quickly in Vietnam, can also sustain wild areas, though only if it is carefully managed. International tourism arrivals neared 15.5 million in 2018 — a startling 64 percent jump above the 2016 figure, which explains the forest of construction cranes we saw ringing the shoreline at the far end of Halong Bay, as high-rise hotels surge into Cat Ba National Park’s environs. They, in turn, explain the habitat fragmentation and near-extinction of the Cat Ba langur and other species that used to inhabit this landscape. About 60 of the animals remain in isolated populations, where feeding and breeding options are nearly foreclosed. In the 1960s, there were some 3,000.

We headed south toward Ho Chi Minh City and from there I took a solo trip, riding three or four hours north to spend a couple of days in Cat Tien National Park. On a sweltering afternoon, a dapper young park ranger led a couple of us on a two-hour “wildlife trek.” This time we really were in a silent forest.

The only thing we encountered were squadrons of dry-ground leeches. They found us very quickly: Blood blossoms appeared on my socks as I stooped to pick the creatures off my ankles. (The ranger was wearing high boots.)

Park rangers and others I spoke with at Cat Tien affirmed that its animal populations are declining; that some rangers have been caught colluding with hunters to bring down high-value animals (though they are said to be severely dealt with), and that the rangers earn something like $200 a month to start, which makes this a less-lucrative career option — and poaching an attractive one.

I stayed at the edge of the park in the well-appointed Cat Tien Jungle Lodge. Its proprietors, Duong Thi Ngoc Phuong and Gary Leong, work to help protect Cat Tien from mass tourism and to build economic ties with impoverished local communities to dissuade them from poaching. “Without the animals, there is little reason for the park’s existence,” Mr. Leong said. “We have to give everyone a stake in protecting them.”

That means, at least in part, creating economic incentives for local people to preserve native species in their natural habitats. And it needs to start soon, wildlife advocates say.

“Every day we all wake up and say, ‘do we have time? Do any of these species have time? Are we just fighting a war that we’ve already lost?’” said Quyen Vu, the executive director of Education for Nature-Vietnam. “But if we don’t fight, then we definitely have lost.”

Stephen Nash is the author of “Grand Canyon for Sale — Public Lands versus Private Interests in the Era of Climate Change.”